Originally published on Substack
I've been quiet lately.
Partly because I've been concentrating less on reacting to the daily noise of the horse world, and more on trying to formalise the ideas underneath it.
Over the past months I've been working on developing the research side of this project — particularly around affective state, behaviour, performance, conflict behaviours, and the way dressage interprets "expression."
I've become increasingly convinced that many of these questions need to be explored through welfare science and behavioural research, rather than remaining solely within traditional training interpretations.
Some of that work is now beginning to take shape as formal papers.
When Technical Faults May Signal Welfare Compromise
The first paper examines something that sits at the heart of this project: whether the vocabulary dressage uses to describe "technical faults" may, in some cases, be masking welfare compromise.
Terms like "tense through the back," "behind the leg," "behind the vertical," and "lacks harmony" or "submission" are typically interpreted as training deficits to be corrected through more schooling. But emerging welfare science suggests that many of the same presentations may reflect pain, discomfort, stress, fear, or maladaptive coping states.
The paper synthesises evidence from peer-reviewed literature on the Ridden Horse Pain Ethogram, conflict behaviours, rein tension, oral lesions, restrictive head-neck postures, stress physiology, and dressage competition studies. Strong evidence supports associations between mouth-related resistance, reduced willingness to go forward, muscular guarding, abnormal postures, and compromised welfare.
Traditional constructs such as harmony, submission, suppleness, and contact overlap conceptually with welfare-relevant observations but are not validated welfare assessment tools. The available literature supports a cautious reinterpretation of several common technical descriptors as potential prompts for welfare investigation rather than automatic biomechanical correction.
The paper is published on SSRN and freely available.
Lasersohn, Paula. When Technical Faults May Signal Welfare Compromise: Reinterpreting Common Dressage Descriptors Through Equine Welfare Science. SSRN (2026). https://ssrn.com/abstract=6734300
Much of this work begins quietly in paddocks, notebooks, conversations, observations, and long hours of reading before it ever becomes a paper. Thank you for coming along with me while I try to untangle it.